Stumbling on Happiness

Stumbling on Happiness (2006) is a non-fiction psychology book by Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert draws upon many studies in the field of social psychology, as well as his own research, to make the case that, for a variety of reasons, people are unable to accurately imagine their futures, specifically, what actions they can take in the present to make themselves happy in the future. In 2007, the book was awarded the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books for the best science writing for a non-specialist audience.

Gilbert begins the book by positioning humans as the only animal that can imagine the future and make decisions about how they want their futures to look. Some people with certain types of brain damage lose this ability to plan ahead, but they may also seem more calm and contented in their daily lives as a result. Humans want to be able to predict their futures because it is gratifying to make choices that help them shape the future they want. Imagining the future is pleasant for most people.

However, the vast majority of people cannot accurately imagine or plan for their futures. This is partly because experience is subjective. Many studies have shown that people are often incapable of knowing precisely what they are feeling at any given moment. When they try to predict what will make them happy in the future, they often make mistakes because happiness is subjective and may change over time.



Another reason that people cannot accurately imagine the future is because of faults in the act of imagining. This has several explanations rooted in neuroscience. First, memories are composed of only the most important facts, with unimportant details filled in by the imagination. Looking forward to the future is like this too, as people tend to only think about the big picture while smaller aspects of happiness are not necessarily rooted in any real-world data.

Next, the mind tends to ignore things that seem unremarkable at the time but that may turn out to be important later. When analyzing the world, people pick up on things that seem unusual or extraordinary, without taking into account that these things are, by their very definition, not an accurate portrayal of what happens most of the time to most people.

Finally, people tend to favor the near future to times in the future that are more distant. Because the near future is much more immediate, people can imagine it more clearly than the distant future. However, when planning for happiness or success, thinking about the distant future is just as important as the immediate future, if not more so when setting long-term goals.



The concept of “presentism” also makes it difficult to accurately imagine the future. Presentism is the idea that the present circumstances take precedent over imagined ideas about the future, as well as memories from the past. For example, if we feel hungry in the present, we might have a difficult time remembering what it felt like to be full or imagining how we will feel after a big meal later. Likewise, imagining a particular emotion requires us to engage the part of our brain that processes emotion. If we are trying to imagine being happy, it is almost impossible if we are depressed at the moment.

Similar to this is the need to anchor ideas about the future in the present. If we imagine being happy in the future, we can only think of it in terms of what would produce happiness at the moment. For example, we might want a career as an artist, knowing that making art would make us happy at the moment. However, by the time we actually start making a living off our art, many variables in our circumstances may have changed and we are no longer as happy about our career as we once would have been.

Finally, Gilbert addresses the fact that imagination and experience are fundamentally different. Imagination cannot actually tell us what we will think when experiencing the imagined event. We often shield ourselves from thinking that our imagination led us to make a bad choice by rationalizing. Whatever may happen to us, we are good at coming up with reasons as to why it is the best possible outcome and we made good choices that led us to that point.



Stumbling on Happiness is forthcoming in its discussion of the limits of imagination and our ability to predict our own futures. It seems to Gilbert that the primary purpose of imagination is not to make accurate predictions about what life will be like for us in the future, but rather to see many possibilities and entertain them, even if not always accurately.